Cory Booker Quotes

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Mandatory prison terms is easy to say, but where are we going to put people?

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

I want to see prison numbers come down. We need better custody that cuts reoffending and crime. And we need to ensure judges, magistrates and the public have full confidence in the other penalties available.

One of my priorities is criminal justice reform, and there is certainly bipartisan appetite for that. I think we need to eliminate the cash bail system. We need to eliminate mandatory minimums. We need sentencing reform. I think we need parole reform as well.

I want to stop piling people into prisons and stop branding people with a felony for a personal weakness.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.